Alex George chose a somewhat photo-realistic route when he made the Wall Mirrored desktop for his Windows system, and the results are not only informative, but extremely slick. He's gone to the trouble of putting together a Rainstaller file to make replicating it one-step easy (install through Rainmeter), but here's a list of components for the more hands-on out there:

Do you have a great, beautifully productive desktop of your own that you'd like to share? Go ahead and post it to the Lifehacker Desktop Show and Tell Flickr Group with a description of how you made it and it may be the next featured desktop.